With its new strategic consulting offering, InnoCentive will help organizations benchmark their open innovation readiness, develop custom innovation approaches and advise them on how best to engage in the cultural and process changes necessary to be successful. This in turn will give organizations the tools to make open innovation repeatable and predictable, like other capabilities in their business.

Timed with the announcement is a blog entry I wrote for the InnoCentive website. Given my work on Innovation Personality Poker, I focused my thoughts on the different innovation styles. Here are some of the thoughts from that article…

As I followed InnoCentive and observed the success of the Solver community, it got me thinking about how problems are solved.

From my research on innovation personality styles, I have observed that there are two broad ways of solving challenges: relational/creative and rational/analytical.

Steve Jobs, President of Apple Inc, once said, “Creativity is just having enough dots to connect . . . connect experiences and synthesize new things. The reason creative people are able to do that is that they’ve had more experiences or have thought more about their experiences than other people.” This beautifully articulates how creative/relational problem solving works.

To date, most InnoCentive Challenges have been more technical in nature and are typically solved through a more rational/analytical approach.

When looking at these two styles, I realized that InnoCentive Solvers are perfectly positioned to use BOTH innovation styles. To explain why I believe this, let’s explore what happens in the brain when solving Challenges…

I am thrilled to (now officially) be working with an amazing company that is changing the world one challenge at a time.

P.S. My other title is “Chief Innovation Evangelist.” This links to my quote in the press release where I say, “InnoCentive already has a strong reputation for open innovation. My role will be to expand this reputation to encompass innovation in general.” UPDATE: The official name for my group is “InnoCentive Consulting: The Architects of Challenge-Based Innovation.”

P.P.S. As mentioned in my earlier blog entry, I will continue to give speeches on innovation and write books.